[ SECRET POST #2960 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2960 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

01.


__________________________________________________



02.


__________________________________________________



03.


__________________________________________________



04.


__________________________________________________



05.


__________________________________________________



06.


__________________________________________________



07.


__________________________________________________



08.


__________________________________________________



09.


__________________________________________________



10.














Notes:

Better early than late!

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 034 secrets from Secret Submission Post #423.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[fscom]

08. http://i.imgur.com/I0CDuD4.png

[(Anonymous)]

I've not read this book, but that part does sound annoying.

But isn't it more common for kids to take only one parent's surname, so avoiding too many hyphens? I believe in some European countries it's the law.

I assume this book was set in the US though. To drop your mother's name after using it for years would be weird.

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, in the US (where the book takes place and where I live -- the book's even set where I live locally, and it's very common in this area for women to keep their maiden names) kids usually take their father's name if the mother keeps hers. That's what I did. I had some friends who hyphenated Mother's-Father's sometimes but dropped the first part of the hyphen at other times. I'm not sure how that worked officially.

[making_excuses]

Mostly everyone I know have both their parents surnames, not hyphenated tho. I assumed that was the norm.

[iceyred]

Never read the books. Just dropping by to say that it was a really predictable and boring movie.

[i_paint_the_sky]

The movie was fairly close to the book for two storylines (Carmen and Tibby), mostly close until the end (Bridget), and extremely different (Lena). I love the series but I also quite enjoyed the movie.

[(Anonymous)]

Why? Not knowing the books, all I see in that semi out of focus excerpt is what appears to be an adolescent POV character being annoyed by her mother's reasoning for keeping a name the character hates, and then changing it too late for said character to benefit.

Not sure I see the problem.

[(Anonymous)]

Because it's such a weird thing to be annoyed and embarrassed by, but the way it's written makes it look like the reader is supposed to sympathize with Tibby, as if the author thinks it's normal that a kid would be embarrassed by their former-feminist mother's stupid naming conventions. I literally don't understand what's so embarrassing about a hyphen (and she's so embarrassed that she lies and says Tomko is her middle name, and when the confused teacher reads her real middle name from the roll, she tries to claim it's a typo. Talk about jumping through hoops over nothing.)

[(Anonymous)]

I've only seen the movie, not read the books, but women changing their name after marriage as well as defaulting to giving the father's surname is a Very Important Issue for me.

I have a lot of ideas on this, but I'll sum them up: Overall, I don't think it's an issue when women go into marriage name and child-naming mindfully and decide what's right for them. I just hate that so many go for what seems easiest because what's easiest it just the default built on years of sexist history.

Furthermore, it's not just doing the default that makes everything "easier." I have numerous friends who don't share surnames with their parents or siblings because of divorce and remarriage. For those families, everything would have been simpler if they all had just gotten their mothers' surname.

[(Anonymous)]

It's really only "easiest" for social reasons, too. Legally, it's a lengthy, annoying process to change your name.

[(Anonymous)]

Here's a less-offputting way of writing the same thing:

"Tibby's mom had insisted on hyphenating her daughter's name during one of the awkward ideological shifts she was prone to. During the next one, she'd insisted on changing her own name when she remarried, holding this to be a strong moral principle, just as its opposite had been a few years earlier. The result was that Tibby was dragging around a surname she shared with no one in the family, attached to her by a hyphen she sometimes got sick of writing on forms."

That presents the same info, but doesn't deride one of her mom's phases as morally inferior to another.

[(Anonymous)]

But that sounds like it was wriien by someone much older who has been to college. The original text has the bluntness of an adolescent.

[ibbity]

Except that Tibby is a super judgy teenager with a bunch of hangups that she deals with in various weird teenage ways, so the original passage gets at her mindset better.

[(Anonymous)]

I'm gonna be nitpicky here and say that that doesn't present the same issue because Alice didn't change her name when she remarried. She's still married to Tibby's father, always has been, since she was 19...I wanna say?

The difference is that by the time they had their second child, several years later, Alice had dropped her maiden name but because Tibby's a minor and it's written on her birth certificate, she's stuck with it.

[(Anonymous)]

Character opinions =/= author opinions. Why do so many people find this so hard to understand?

[(Anonymous)]

Sometimes though, you can tell when the character's opinions support/are a mouthpiece for the author's. Why do so many people find this so hard to understand?

[ibbity]

IMO this is actually a case of the character's viewpoint not necessarily representing the author's. Tibby is a judgy, crabby teenager with a bunch of hangups who has difficulty seeing other peoples' perspectives. You can't expect a character like that to be all cool and logical and sensible and broad-minded about stuff that causes her annoyance all the time.

[(Anonymous)]

I always read that part as just another example of Tibby feeling screwed by being her parents' "practice child", and how hypocritical they got as she grew. They raised her one way then re-started life a different way after she was used to the first way and didn't "fit" anymore. I didn't think that the name itself really offended Tibby more than the fact that she was being singled out by it.

I never read past the first four books so I don't know if it was addressed, but it did upset me that Tibby did genuinely seem to be a youthful mistake in the eyes of her parents. The way they were trying to ship her off to college as soon as they could made me sad.

[(Anonymous)]

Wow. That's really sad. Poor kid.

[(Anonymous)]

Only the first four books? The fifth was an unplanned, OOC epilogue with Tibby advising her friends from the grave. I ignore it.

[(Anonymous)]

I've read the book as a kid, don't remember anything besides it being about teens. And teens could be definitely annoyed by that or disapprove of their parents previous choices. I did :D . Also, went through a conservative phase back then.

My mother never married, I have her name - I was more embarassed by expaining the lack of father. However, I had classmates with odd and un-matching family names - they've always dealt with crap. It's believable that a kid could think this way.

[(Anonymous)]

I definitely got the conservative vibe when there was some weird anti-choice shit in the very last book.

[(Anonymous)]

So all books have to align with your political views or they're conservative shit? Nice.

[ibbity]

I...don't remember any of that. I do remember that the pregnant character has a tough time figuring out what to so and eventually decides to keep the baby, but I don't remember any "anti-choice shit," especially considering she went to Planned Parenthood to get checked out.

Transcript

[(Anonymous)]

Image: the cover of Ann Brasheres’ The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants and a scanned page with the passage:

It was one of the many ironies in her life that Tibby was the only member of her five-person family who still hauled the stupid name Tomoko around. It was her mother’s maiden name. When her parents had been hippies and communists and everything, her mother had derided women who changed their names when they got married. She’d been Alice Tomoko then, and she’d stuck Tibby not only with the name but with the hyphen. Thirteen years later, when Nicky came along, her mother had actually dropped the name Tomoko herself. “It just makes everything so complicated,” she had muttered.

(this part’s actually from book 2, but w/e)

Secret Text: The first time I read it I thought this part was a little weird and stupid but no big deal. As time went on though, all the implications here appeared worse and worse, until this one quick passage eventually ruined the entire series for me.

But I’m also grateful it exists, because without it I wouldn’t have gone on to notice any of the more subtle ways the books promote this way of thinking. Now I firmly believe they’re nothing but conservative glurge pretending to be cool and pro-girl*

*But not feminist. Oh goodness, no! Believing in gender equality is only for silly commie hippies and makes you do wild and crazy things like hyphenate your last name -- right, Ann Brashares?